Fading Gigolo (2013)

Directed by: John Turturro
Country: USA

Movie Review: “Fading Gigolo” could be a Woody Allen’s romantic comedy but it’s not. It was written and directed by John Turturro, adopting the same Allen’s posture – a nice jazzy score, some effective jokes about Jews, and a romantic story involving a middle-aged gigolo, which became the most uninteresting aspect. The film opens with Murray (Woody Allen), a broke bookshop owner, telling his friend Fioravante (Turturro) that Dr. Parker (Sharon Stone), a rich dermatologist, asked him if he knew a man interested in a ménage a trois. With Fioravante in mind, he said yes but added that the price would be a thousand dollars. Reluctant at first, Fioravante finally accepts the challenge, becoming a gigolo and paying the appropriate commission to Murray, assumedly his new pimp. The scheme falls out of the routine when Murray convinces a young Jewish widow and mother of six kids, Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), to get out of her loneliness and find human contact. The best situations, some of them hilarious, are those that had nothing to do with the central story. I’m remembering when Murray arranges a baseball game for the kids in Brooklyn – African-American (the children of the woman he lives with) against the Jews (Avigal’s kids), or when he is forced to go to a Jewish court. With a competent direction and the lightness commonly associated to the genre, “Fading Gigolo” had its really funny moments but was incapable to show any chemistry with its ‘fading’ love story. Moreover, Turturro should find his own voice since the mood adopted, together with Woody Allen’s presence, bring to our mind the films of the latter.